This is not an extra car outside. Not a temporary adjustment. Not a detail for a specific event or a few tense days while something gets handled.
This is a man.
A stranger.
Someone outside the family.
Someone I have never met, who is apparently going to show up, and what? Start dictating where I go and how I move, and whether I can walk into my own kitchen without somebody tracking my location?
The water beats against my shoulders, hot enough to sting a little, and I brace one hand against the tile wall as irritation climbs again.
What burns most is that no one asked me.
Not really.
They informed me.
That’s what Papà did in his office yesterday. He sat behind that desk and announced that a decision had already been made, an arrangement had already been put in place, a man had already been hired, and now I was expected to rearrange my life around it like I should be grateful anyone bothered to tell me before he showed up on my doorstep.
As if this is happening to some abstract problem instead of to me.
As if I am not the one who has to live with it.
I tip my head back under the spray and slick my hair back, trying to force some of the tension out of my shoulders. It doesn’t do much good. My mind keeps circling the same points, the same insults, the same aggravating truth at the center of all of it.
The men in my life always do this.
Not always in obvious ways. Not always with cruelty. Most of the time, they would tell themselves it comes from love, from worry, from duty, from all the things powerful men tell themselves when they start rearranging other people’s lives without permission.
But the result is the same.
They swoop in. They decide. They adjust the board. And I’m the one expected to absorb the change with grace.
I reach for the shampoo and work it through my hair harder than necessary.
I have spent years proving myself.
Years.
At Wharton, where nobody gave a damn who my father was except as a point of curiosity.
Back here, where I took over the financial side of family operations and then the casino, and had to fight to be seen as anything but the youngest Conti child playing at business.
Every report, every meeting, every ugly stretch of numbers, every negotiation, every late night, every decision that turned out well because I made it and not because some man hovered behind me whispering instructions into my ear.
I built that. I did.
And still, when it comes down to it, I get handled like the fragile one.
The little girl.
The daughter.
The one who can be patted on the head, swept aside, and managed.
I rinse the shampoo out and try not to think about the worst part.
It doesn’t work.
